Joanna Davidson

I am a sociocultural anthropologist and affiliate faculty member at the African Studies Center, Kilachand Honors College, Women’s Gender & Sexuality Studies Program, and Global Policy Development Center. My research is based in rural West Africa, where I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Guinea-Bissau since 2001. My monographs and co-edited books include Sacred Rice: Identity, Environment, & Development in Rural West Africa (2016); Narrating Illness: Prospects and Constraints (2016); Opting Out: Women Messing with Marriage around the World (2022); and Pathos & Power: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Widowhood in Africa, Past and Present (forthcoming). I have published in various peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes on topics such as social and religious transformation, cultural conceptions of knowledge, the politics of storytelling, marriage, and gender relations. I am currently working on a book tentatively titled Singing Wives & Silent Widows: Essays on Naming, Marriage, and Death in Rural West Africa. In addition to academic writing, I have presented testimony and prepared policy briefings based on my research for the United Nations and served on the boards of the American Ethnological Society and the Association for Feminist Anthropology.